How Much Would You Pay for an iPhone 4 Prototype?

How did this get out? And are you willing to cough up a hundred grand?

There is an auction that offers a genuine iPhone 4 prototype device for sale. It's not Gizmodo that's selling the device, but a cell-phone repair service that decided to auction the phone instead of using it for spare parts. Would you pay more than $100,000?

iPhones aren't cheap. So don't expect a rare and possibly unique version to be especially cheap, either. A phone that looks pretty much like the phone that Gizmodo acquired through some questionable channels just before the official release of the iPhone 4 is currently auctioned off on eBay. The bid at the time of this writing: $101,800 (a $1 million bid was removed by the seller.)

According to the auction, the phone is a genuine testing device, which would mean that it is or at least was owned by Apple(Nasdaq: AAPL). We have no idea how the seller acquired this phone, but we doubt that Apple would simply give a test device out to the general market. We believe there's a good chance Apple still owns this device, but the seller claims he bought it from someone who had no idea that it was a tester. He states that the device was bought "legally."